Abstract
Midwifery has re-emerged as a birthing system and women are again seeking midwives as their birth attendants. This pluralization of the U.S. medical system and its birthing system is on one level of interpretation is attributable to some primarily middle class women's and couples' dissatisfaction with hospital maternity care and with physicians' activist attitude and interventionist approach to child birth. The practice of lay or independent midwifery began to emerge in the late 1960's, in conjunction with, and as a response to, these women's demands for unmedicated birth experiences. It is argued that these women's dissatisfactions with medicalized birth and the lay midwife's alternative definition of and approach to birth are expressions of the more generalized dissatisfaction with the institutions of modernity, the materialistic explanation of science, and the rational solutions of technology.
Sigma Membership
Delta Mu
Type
Dissertation
Format Type
Text-based Document
Study Design/Type
Historical
Research Approach
Other
Keywords:
Childbirth, Midwifery, Alternative Births, Nurse-Midwives
Advisor
Eugenia Georges
Second Advisor
Stephen A. Tyler
Third Advisor
Elizabeth Long
Degree
PhD
Degree Grantor
Rice University
Degree Year
1996
Recommended Citation
Lentz, Judith R., "Times past-times present: The midwife" (2022). Dissertations. 1739.
https://www.sigmarepository.org/dissertations/1739
Rights Holder
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All submitting authors or publishers have affirmed that when using material in their work where they do not own copyright, they have obtained permission of the copyright holder prior to submission and the rights holder has been acknowledged as necessary.
Review Type
None: Degree-based Submission
Acquisition
Proxy-submission
Date of Issue
2022-01-31
Full Text of Presentation
wf_yes
Description
This dissertation has also been disseminated through the ProQuest Dissertations and Theses database. Dissertation/thesis number: 9631055; ProQuest document ID: 304269896. The author still retains copyright.